England was still merry England in the times of good Queen Bess, and rang with old songs, such as kept this milkmaid company; songs, said Bishop Joseph Hall, which were “sung to the wheel and sung unto the pail.”  Shakspere loved their simple minstrelsy; he put some of them into the mouth of Ophelia, and scattered snatches of them through his plays, and wrote others like them himself: 

  Now, good Cesario, but that piece of song. 
  That old and antique song we heard last night. 
  Methinks it did relieve my passion much,
  More than light airs and recollected terms
  Of these most brisk and giddy-paced times. 
  Mark it, Cesario, it is old and plain. 
  The knitters and the spinners in the sun
  And the free maids that weave their threads with bones
  Do use to chant it; it is silly sooth[20]
  And dallies with the innocence of love
  Like the old age.

[Footnote 20:  Simple truth.]

Many of these songs, so natural, fresh, and spontaneous, together with sonnets and other more elaborate forms of lyrical verse, were printed in miscellanies, such as the Passionate Pilgrim, England’s Helicon, and Davison’s Poetical Rhapsody.  Some were anonymous, or were by poets of whom little more is known than their names.  Others were by well-known writers, and others, again, were strewn through the plays of Lyly, Shakspere, Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, and other dramatists.  Series of love sonnets, like Spenser’s Amoretti and Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella, were written by Shakspere, Daniel, Drayton, Drummond, Constable, Watson, and others, all dedicated to some mistress real or imaginary.  Pastorals, too, were written in great number, such as William Browne’s Britannia’s Pastorals and Shepherd’s Pipe (1613-1616) and Marlowe’s charmingly rococo little idyl, The Passionate Shepherd to his Love, which Shakspere quoted in the Merry Wives of Windsor, and to which Sir Walter Raleigh wrote a reply.  There were love stories in verse, like Arthur Brooke’s Romeo and Juliet (the source of Shakspere’s tragedy), Marlowe’s fragment, Hero and Leander, and Shakspere’s Venus and Adonis, and Rape of Lucrece, the first of these on an Italian and the other three on classical subjects, though handled in any thing but a classical manner.  Wordsworth said finely of Shakspere, that he “could not have written an epic:  he would have died of a plethora of thought.”  Shakspere’s two narrative poems, indeed, are by no means models of their kind.  The current of the story is choked at every turn, though it be with golden sand.  It is significant of his dramatic habit of mind that dialogue and soliloquy usurp the place of narration, and that, in the Rape of Lucrece especially, the poet lingers over the analysis of motives and feelings, instead of hastening on with the action, as Chaucer, or any born story-teller, would have done.